LETTERS; What Is Real?

Published: March 28, 2010

To the Editor:

Luc Sante, perhaps echoing pleasurable, intoxicating confusions found in David Shields's ''Reality Hunger'' (March 14), fails to distinguish lies from fictions. Such a conflation can be exciting; it generates an illusion of profundity. The illusion vanishes when the rather obvious distinction it obscures is recalled.

''You could say without exaggeration that everything on TV is fiction whether it is packaged as such or not,'' he writes. So writing fails to be an exaggeration only if to call it such would be a gross understatement. Such cute verbal posing conveys little interest in reality. But reality, on Sante's account, contains patches of the unreal. Adolescents, or persons nostalgic for their condition, may experience a frisson upon hearing such stuff.

It isn't true, of course. The true things it might be trying to express in a flamboyant way, that for instance the real includes us, and we imagine things that are not, believe things that are not so and want things that cannot be, are as familiar as our heartbeats. And as important. To doll them up as metaphysical revelations, though, is to flirt with the pernicious notion that the self and the world can't be distinguished.

If Sante has written faithfully about ''Reality Hunger,'' then Shields has written an escapist manifesto in drag.